


blood orange

by gimmetheknife



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blood and Injury, M/M, Tenderness, nose bleeds and black eyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:35:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27654208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gimmetheknife/pseuds/gimmetheknife
Summary: doyoung knows taeyong is strong enough for the both of them.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Lee Taeyong
Comments: 2
Kudos: 41





	blood orange

**Author's Note:**

> just a lil something i wrote for my fiction class last semester. pls take the blood and injury tag seriously. hope you like it

Doyoung watched the dark and empty street.

Not quite midnight, the neighborhood was slow moving and quiet and all Doyoung could do was sit on the edge of the porch and wait for the familiar flash of headlights. He had been half asleep when the phone rang, the familiar “Oscar and the Wolf” song floating around his room. He answered after the second ring to the noises of a party on fraternity row: loud conversations, muddled music, and Taeyong’s static voice on the other end saying, _I’m bleeding, but_ _it’s not too bad._

To Taeyong, nights spent fighting and the injuries they caused never ended up being too bad. Doyoung learned to stop asking what happened after the fourth or fifth phone call, after everything became out in the open, and learned to sit on his hands and wait. Taeyong sounded okay on the phone, but Doyoung couldn’t help but feel this time would be different than the ones before.

Another minute went by, the moon casting long shadows over the wet grass, when a car pulled down the street and started towards Doyoung like a light in the dark. The headlights didn’t illuminate his face immediately; they found his hands outstretched on his knees first.

Doyoung’s shoulders trembled as he watched the headlights flick off and Taeyong shift himself out of the car, raggedy and out of breath. One hand clutched to his nose, the other catching himself in the grass as he stumbled forward. From a distance, he looked unharmed and it wasn’t until he stepped into the rectangle light on the front lawn could Doyoung detect the first signs of injury.

Doyoung swallowed through the sour panic rising in his throat and wondered if this was how it would be for the rest of their lives—Taeyong walking up the green lawn of Doyoung’s life with blood in his mouth and bruised knuckles. He met Taeyong halfway, like he always did, catching him by his arm and hefting a shoulder beneath him, a human crutch as they stumbled across the dark grass, up the porch steps, and into the house.

“You’re bleeding,” Doyoung said, stupidly. It was all he could think to say.

“Yeah,” Taeyong cleared his throat, blood dribbling down his chin. “I didn’t think he hit me that hard.”

Navigating the dark stairs with Taeyong’s arm around his waist and his hot breath in his ear, Doyoung learned the gist of what happened. “It was just one guy,” Taeyong said. “Not too big or anything but his hands were _huge_ for some reason? And I didn’t even know he was there until I heard him say something—”

Doyoung pressed his free hand to the banister, guiding their way up the unlit stairs. “What did he say?”

“Nothing.” Taeyong hurried out. “Just stuff about me—about you. None of that matters. I got him first. Right in the chin. He had me a few times after that. It happened fast, but I know he was the one trying to get off the floor when I left.”

Upstairs—under the bathroom lights—he looked half-dead: split bottom lip, eye swollen to a glossy slit, sickly pale and exhausted, blood everywhere. His nose got the worst of the beating. Swollen twice in size, splotchy with dark red blooming beneath the skin, and dripping blood whenever Taeyong stopped applying pressure.

“It’s not so bad,” Taeyong said, muffled behind the blood draining down the back of his throat. White-knuckled, he gripped the porcelain sink and spit out mouthfuls of it, careful not to choke.

Doyoung looked at him, and the dried blood running down his neck in disconnected lines. “Is this just from the nose?”

Taeyong nodded.

“Move your hand.”

“Not yet,” Taeyong said. “I’m still bleeding.”

“I _know_. We have to make it stop,” Doyoung caught him by the back of his neck. “Let me _see_.”

Taeyong lurched sideways from the pull, dropping his hand to brace himself on the front of Doyoung’s chest, exposing his nose completely. The front of Taeyong’s shirt bloomed red poppies from the blood falling there in slow drips and instinctively, like it was all he was good for, Doyoung leaned forward, catching the stream of blood in his cupped palms.

The blood dripped warm and honey-like in his hands. Doyoung watched as red stained the skin of his fingers. Iron flooded his nose, so stagnant and overwhelming, it scared him that he hadn’t smelled the thickness of it before. He kept his palms together, staring down at the blood pooling there, not even noticing as Taeyong struggled for a hand towel hanging behind the bathroom door and saying _here, use this_.

Doyoung couldn’t make sense of it, of what made Taeyong’s blood darker than his.

“It’s so dark,” he murmured, not looking up. “Why is it so dark?”

“You’ve just never seen so much of it before.”

Before Doyoung could intercept the flow of blood with the towel, Taeyong insisted on looking at himself in the mirror, face bare and wounds raw. He stretched his lips over his teeth, skin of his swollen lip pulled taunt, and smiled at his reflection. Blood from his nose crisscrossed around his open mouth before coming together again at the base of his throat.

“Look,” he said, running his tongue along his teeth. “They’re all there,” and then “I know this looks bad, but I swear he only got in three good punches. You know how those types of guys are. Just hit you to say they did. There wasn’t even anything for him to be _angry_ about. It was weird—he was actually pretty calm. He stopped hitting me the minute my blood started getting on his hands. I probably would’ve been worse off if he hadn’t noticed. See? The swellings already going down.”

He was lying. The swelling of his eye, nose, bottom lip had only gotten worse, and if Doyoung had any sense of self-awareness at all, piling Taeyong into the passenger seat of his car and running every red light until they were at the hospital—watching bedside as Taeyong was pumped full of pain meds and something to stop the steady blood flow of his nose—should have been the only thing on his mind, but he didn’t because something was always so sincere behind Taeyong’s every word. Something that made you believe him no matter how much blood he had already lost. So, Doyoung shook the hospital idea from his mind and settled on ice and expired Tylenol behind the bathroom mirror to bring Taeyong back from the farthest he had ever seen him.

Doyoung didn’t say anything, just reached for a second hand towel beneath the sink.

“It has to stop eventually, right?” Taeyong asked and for a moment, Doyoung could see the abnormal flash of worry melt across Taeyong’s features before he went back to smiling hazily at his reflection in the mirror. Blood stained his straight teeth, his lips, the soft slope of his jaw.

Doyoung pulled the towel away from Taeyong’s nose, uncovering the beginning of a deep black bruise over the bridge. Blood had begun to coagulate on the edges of his nostrils. “I think it’s broken.”

“It’s not,” Taeyong shook his head. “Just give me a second.”

Even bloodied and bruised, it felt hard not to look at him. Shorter than most and skinny but not frail, boyish looking in the face with wrinkles beneath his eyes, sloped nose, dark hair that fell across his forehead. When he spoke, his voice was soft and sincere. Words seemed to float out of him. He seemed enigmatic in the way people noticed him—good or bad. Alluring in the purest sense, unaware of just how warm he was to anyone who had a chance to meet him.

“Do you think it’ll always be like this?” Doyoung asked before he even knew that he was.

“What?”

Doyoung applied more pressure to the base of Taeyong’s nose. The blood wasn’t coming as fast anymore. “You, me, the way everyone thinks they need to do something about it.”

“No,” Taeyong said like things were easy.

“ _No?_ ” Doyoung motioned to the mirror. The word seemed to bubble from the pit of his chest. “How can you say that when you look like this?”

“Because I’m not the one who’s angry,” Taeyong whispered. “I’m not angry anymore, but everyone else still is.”

“I’ve never been angry,” Doyoung told him, and his voice was steady. “Never at you.”

“Never at me,” repeated Taeyong. “Only at yourself.”

Doyoung turned away, feeling Taeyong’s unwaivering eyes on him even as he stared down at the blood drying on his hands. None of this had been simple or easy, not even when the only person who knew anything about this was the one bleeding in front of him. Doyoung was only suffocating himself at this point, navigating his own shortcomings while Taeyong could only stand and watch helplessly from the sidelines. This fight would always be something Doyoung had to do on his own. There was so much a punch could do—so much a hit could prove—but he had never been brave enough. Not even when Taeyong came home choking on his own blood but feeling more free than Doyoung could even comprehend.

Doyoung pulled the towel from beneath Taeyong’s nose. The blood had only begun to trickle. He pressed the towel back where it had been and said, “I can’t bleed for the same reasons you do.”

“You don’t have to,” Taeyong told him after his nose ran dry. “I can bleed enough for the both of us.”

The sincerity almost made Doyoung delirious, stupid happy at the realization he was never alone in this. Not really. And maybe because none of this was supposed to be something as simple as black and white—something as angry as a punch and the broken nose that followed.

Maybe none of the shame had to come from anger or fear, because this was their life, and Taeyong was the only person he wanted to wipe the blood from.

With steady hands, he pulled the towel from Taeyong’s face and held it in the space between their chests as if to ask _Where do we go from here?_ Taeyong said nothing, only smiled and took the towel from Doyoung’s hands into his own.

“Come here,” Doyoung said after a long moment. His hands slipped up the hem of Taeyong’s shirt. “Let me wash this out.”

As the tap water ran lukewarm and Taeyong’s nose hadn’t started bleeding again, Doyoung watched, as if in slow motion, the color travel back to Taeyong’s cheeks. His face was still swollen and there was a lot of untouched damage around his eye but the bleeding had stopped, and their mouths tipped up at the sight.

His T-shirt washed out blood orange; the colored stained the porcelain for a few seconds before it diluted itself down the drain. Doyoung added the towels to the sink after hanging Taeyong’s T-shirt over the shower rod to dry. They stood—shoulder to shoulder—watching the last of the blood rinse out from the white fabric. Doyoung could hear Taeyong’s heart beating and let himself wonder if anything else outside the bathroom, where they were together, mattered.

Taeyong leaned shirtless over the counter and began prodding the swollen mess of his eye. “I’ll get some ice,” he said and was just about to slip over the threshold of the bathroom when he extended his hand, crusted with blood and torn at the knuckles, backwards to find Doyoung’s already held out waiting for him in the space between.

They left the bloody towels soaking in the sink, and knew well enough there was no going back.

**Author's Note:**

> heart emoji


End file.
